Google & Salesforce.com Lovefest – Get a Room Already!

Why doesn’t Google just go ahead an make an honest woman out of Salesforce.com? After announcing a pretty significant commitment to each other last June, the two are back with another announcement.

According to the announcement, Google and Salesforce.com…

…today expanded their global strategic alliance to make it easy for companies of all sizes to run their business in the cloud with Salesforce for Google Apps. The combination of the Google Apps(TM) suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications enables businesses to effectively communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Salesforce for Google Apps also leverages the Force.com Platform and Google’s open APIs, opening up even more development opportunities for developers and partners.

Sounds like the two companies are continuing to find many synergies and opportunities to work together…

“Google and salesforce.com have always had similar models and philosophies about delivering innovations made possible by the Internet,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com…”The combination of our leading CRM applications and Google’s business productivity applications pushes forward the transformation of the industry to cloud computing. The end of software is here.”

And of course, both companies face a common enemy. Benioff told TechCrunch…

“Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend. I have spoken with a lot of customers who want to get off of Microsoft Word.”

With a market cap of $7.1 billion, Salesforce wouldn’t be a small acquisition–although one that Google could easily afford–and some of the company’s products don’t match up with Google pricing strategy, but its definitely a viable deal.

After watching so many tech companies align themselves in a partnership, before one ultimately buys the other, I’d be more shocked if we didn’t see Google acquire Salesforce, than vice versa.

Definitely some common ground, or should I say a common enemy….hahahah….what’s nice about this collaboration, vs OpenOffice for example, is the fact that no hardware nor software is required, making it affordable and accessible to many. The integrity of one’s data is the only concern though.